Seems like you put a lot of thought to it old-death. I although would like to remind you that the current method yields a desirable outcome for which has for the time being worked sufficiently enough.
The G2 crawler is the best tool for trying to achieve the best trend, and I believe dcat is the person worth hearing there opinion on the matter, due to his statistics and analytical background.
G2 Crawler - DensityFor me it boils down to logical reasoning:
1) What are the rules of the current system? (It is in the code, I don't remember off the top of my head)
2) Does the current system promote people whom barely can run as a hub connected to 300 leaves? (How much bandwidth is required, and how much RAM/ Processor speed is needed to run 300 leaves effectively?)
3) Would it be more simpler to change those current rules to have the desired outcome as oppossed to a total synthetic benchmark method?
4) What are the desired outcome? (What sort of hub density, and diversity are you trying to achieve? Ideally you want all Hubs at 300, for resiliency you want Hubs with low numbers)
5) What are the benefits of limiting the number of hubs in the population? (Better clustering, resulting in quicker searches.)
6) What are the repercussions? (Loss of network resiliency, points of failure begin to narrow. Also hubs are location based, as nightfalls a bunch turn off and others come to replace.)
So once we clear questions like that we can begin to make changes to this network core. Hasty additions to the hub promoting mechanism can have a dire crippling effect to the network. I mean the moores law thing is most often not the bottleneck, but rather RAM or mostly internet connection speed. To siavoshkc make a method of testing internet speed that is least intrusive, and we can add to the quickstart wizard ... this could solve most hub related problems. Also we have to ensure that a Hub gets the maximum allotted bandwidth, lets say if someone is downloading but is a hub ... his download should be off the bandwidth leftover after the overhead of the network.